Chapter 13
Chasing the Dead: Amateur Adventures in Genealogy

There is history in all men’s lives
William Shakespeare 

When we were growing up, my Aunt Bess, my father’s youngest sibling, was a New York City policewoman; she joined the force following the path of two of my uncles, Tom and Eddie. A photo of Bess between her uniformed brothers appeared in the centerfold of the New York Daily News when she graduated from the academy.

Another newspaper photo later showed her and my Uncle Eddie as members of the first Pipe Band of the Police Department Emerald Society. Until she died earlier this year, Bess was the only surviving founder of that manifestation of the dominance of the Irish in the NYPD. Their formation ironically came just as the demographic tide started to turn. But no one knew that at the time. We assumed that the Irish would always be the cops. 

 At seven or eight, hearing that Bess worked in the Missing Persons department, troubled me. That concept — ‘missing persons’ — the notion of someone ripped from their family, their world was scary for a kid. That which went missing was rarely found in our lives. However, Bess assured us that very few of her cases were kidnappings. Once you sorted out the people who would eventually turn up as homicides and suicides, her department was left with a rather large group of individuals who extracted themselves from their families; the ones who went out for the proverbial ‘pack of cigarettes’ and never came back.  

In that conversation at my grandmother’s kitchen table in Throgs Neck, my aunt (who also showed us her pearl handled revolver that day AND bullets!) said something that stuck in my child mind. “There are lots of people who want to be missing,” she said, “And not everybody wants to be found.” But it was only after my brother Michael’s death, that its application to his life hit me. He embodied the Tolkeinish line: “Not all who wander are lost, not all who are lost wish to be found.” When the Elliott brothers pilgrimaged to Ireland in 2010, Michael would be missing, a consequence of a life of hiding in plain sight.

His having gone missing from our quintet and other family clusters was more metaphorical than physical. We went to college; he didn’t. We settled down, more or less; he was itinerant, more than less. He was pretty much a lifelong bartender; we didn’t even visit bars much after college what with our white collar jobs and white picket fences. Again metaphorical.

It’s not that we lacked for connection to Mike, but communication even if constant does not conflict with concealment. The man could talk and like the rest of us found the sound of his own voice both melodious and godlike. And when email came along, he could flood our inboxes with crazy political rants. Mike’s missingness at the time of our trip was not physical: we could find him in Florida near Daytona then, just a few hours from the other right-wing Elliotts. 

What makes someone missing in his sense was that not wanting to be found as Aunt Bess insinuated. Mike had a side to him that eluded understanding and cut him away from the crowd of us. He deserves this chapter if only to straighten out the arithmetic: five brothers, but only four searchers? (We will make some amends later to my very dear, long-suffering, unfairly excluded sister Irene.) But the deeper reason for alighting on his story prior to getting us finally to Ireland rests in a resolution mentioned in the first of these chapters: “Chasing  was also and perhaps mainly about explaining myself to myself… to connect the dots of our descent to the present day.” Can’t just leave out one of the dots even if Mike didn’t get to Ireland or share our engrossment with genealogy. Have to chase all the dead — even the more recent departures — to get those answers as to what caused what in our brood .

Mike was a missing personal also in the first sense of the word in English, going wrong, making a mistake, erring. No need to catalogue those things here but they do raise the question of whether some line in the family chart wiggled and wavered like Mike’s? Looking only for the successful examples, the straight and bold lines won’t help learning more about how ancestry shaped us (and, of course, especially me as noted).  Michael was a contradiction to the ancestral story line too large to ignore here, a slash of secrets that underlined the question:  Where did he come from in this family tree?

This complicated man taught me how to cheat at cards by cheating me at cards when I was about five years old. He chanced that our parents would not quickly notice how my little Bambi glass globe bank had all of a sudden gone empty. He lost that gamble and received one of his myriad punishments, which in our house were mostly physical; the Irish of that era were more for tossing you to the corner rather than making you stand there.

Where I avoided fights, he sought them. Where I doubted an outcome, he doubled down. Where I feared my father’s wrath, he dared it. When we all stepped back from the ‘dawn patrol’ of bars and bongs, went to college, and got regular jobs, he became the permanent crossing guard to the wild side, a little legend of animal appetites wrapped up in a corroding anger. He lived up to his nickname of ‘Cannonball’ crashing and ricocheting, eliciting amazement  — unless you were part of the damage.

There were moments when he ran out of room. In one of them, he was well into his forties and running the biker bar that he owned, Just One, a shadowy strip mall hole in Ormond Beach. While closing up one night, two members of a motorcycle gang came in and pistol whipped him. I never knew the details, but I gathered it was not a random attack. Only an accidental interruption by some patron stumbling in hoping for a nightcap kept them from murdering him. Michael recovered and testified against them. They went away to jail for a long time. I never heard him tell the story again. He pulled back, his body started to fail him. If hard partying happened occasionally, the ensuing punishments he suffered  — all self-inflicted -– grew harsher each time. 

The nature of his absence was in an inverse presentation of self in everyday life. In the 1980s while still laboring in the tangled vineyard of addiction treatment, Monica McGoldrick introduced me to a label for a certain type of Irish-American, the gregarious stranger, that described the pattern of fathers in Irish families to forge multiple vibrant relationships outside of the home while remaining a cipher when back with the wife and kids. That was Mike, the gregarious stranger. When he died, dozens of notes to me from people all around the world remembered Michael and that killer smile, the wicked gleam in his eye, the way he could talk you into things some of them even good, but keep his real motivations and thinking hidden as all good magicians do.

Two examples of his convincing were my working for him as a bartender and as a bouncer. In the first job, lasting a few months while pursuing the actor’s life in Manhattan, I committed the cardinal sin of cutting off his best customers when they got tipply. Career suicide ensued for this mixologist but the experience also yielded a host of insights into that world that came in handy when I returned to being an alcoholism counselor. At the bouncer job, he gave me instructions that if a fight seemed imminent, make sure to hit the instigator first as hard as I possibly could. Surprisingly, that advice then served me (metaphorically) very very well in the business world.

“to go missing: … not being in an expected place.” Despite this deliberate distance he kept from the patterns of our lives, the darker regions we knew were within him, we were all in on our contradictions with him. Despite all his craziness, I made him the godfather for my son. My daughters, not yet double digits in age, loved going into that Ormond Beach biker bar, Just One, amidst the ZZ Top wannabes, leathery divorcees, and the photos of all the women Mike had persuaded to pose showing ‘just one’. We forgave him much only to be forced to forgive again, or worse forget.

But John balked at the middle child wanting to join the Irish search. There were many reasons for that. Most pertinently, although he lived in Florida like the other three amigos, Mike’s diabetic neuropathy and emphysema, souvenirs in part from a hard lived life, meant that he couldn’t walk very far. “Leaving the house, going over the bridge as I call it, to grocery shopping and doctors appointments,” he told me one day on the phone, “that’s about all I can do.” But he said this without pity for he continued, “I traveled enough in my life: up and down, over the moon and under the weather, out to the frontier.” And we both knew that he didn’t mean the Wild West, but rather the reaches of acceptable behavior, the places where the norms disintegrate and then disappear. He traveled to those wild rough edges as long as he lived even if it was in a motorized wheelchair with an oxygen tank attached. (We all live a lot closer to those places now, don’t we?)

Mike and I talked on the phone now and then until he died. We exchanged those stupid emails filled with lavish conspiracies on his side and starchy rebuttal pastings from Snopes.com on my side. In his last years, John, Jim, and Brendan rushed repeatedly to his hospital bed only to find him flirting with the nurses and asking why they had not brought him a shooter of Courvoisier.  

Dead more than a decade now, his ashes ended up off a jetty in Asbury Park — or so rumor has it because such burials are highly illegal. I gave the eulogy at his funeral in 2014. He told his daughter that it was my job and even supplied some scribbled notes. The heart of his prescribed content were lines from a Willy Nelson song:

I’ve got a long list of real good reasons
For all the things I’ve done
I’ve got a picture in the back of my mind
Of what I’ve lost and what I’ve won
I’ve survived every situation
Knowing when to freeze and when to run
And regret is just a memory written on my brow
And there’s nothing I can do about it now

I’ve got a wild and a restless spirit
I held my price through every deal
I’ve seen the fire of a woman scorned
Turn her heart of gold to steel
I’ve got the song of the voice inside me
Set to the rhythm of the wheel
And I’ve been dreaming like a child
Since the cradle broke the bow
And there’s nothing I can do about it now

…
And I could cry for the time I’ve wasted
But that’s a waste of time and tears
And I know just what I’d change
If went back in time somehow
But there’s nothing I can do about it now

I let that song be his apologia and then said some other things to make everyone feel good because that’s what a eulogy is for. As Samuel Johnson is reputed to have noted, “a man is not upon his oath when delivering a funeral oration.” It was not the moment to talk about missing persons.

So why bring all this up here? Nihil nisi bonum. Right? Speak nothing but good of the dead? It’s to remind me that while untangling the family forces that made me make sure to also look for “what the hand and what the eye dare framed thy fearful symmetry“, Michael, Michael Motorcycle.  Looking for roots starts by turning left and right to those siblings who also influenced you.

Chapters 1-12